Today, couples don’t have to struggle in the dark as they try to learn how to pleasure their partner. The Internet has demystified sex for millions of people, and it has put love and intimacy at our fingertips. Technology is only going to continue to take sex to a whole new level in the future.

Currently sex aids are widely available, but the future is going to hold some truly edgy products. Futurists are predicting that—in just 10 to 15 years—there will be robots that will look and feel incredibly lifelike, robots with which you can cuddle and have sex. You will be able to design your perfect mate, complete with the right voice and the artificial intelligence to whisper those sweet nothings at exactly the right time.

Virtual romantic partners like Samantha in the movie “Her” will be a reality. In fact, a new app called Invisible Boyfriend is already out, sending you loving texts like a real boyfriend might.

We will be able to have robust sexual experiences without touching. Talk about disease prevention! Imagine engaging in anything from targeted foreplay to exploring your wildest fantasies by stimulating your partner with a click of a mouse, even when you are across town or in another country.

Golly. More:

I suspect for the next decade or so we will be riding a wave, seeking more stimulation in less time, quick transitory couplings, and the next big thing to make sex more exciting. The good news is that sex will be safer and more exploratory than ever, given the virtual capabilities. The bad news is that we will likely see an uptick in sexual addiction and a decrease in emotional connection with partners. People struggle with the existential depression and loneliness that comes from a lack of rich, authentic connections. Eventually, there may be a conservative movement of sex-technology Luddites who shun the technological advances. The inevitable social struggle will last for a while, but in the future, freedom will be the winning mantra.

The culture of death advances. Here are two quotes cited by historian John Lukacs:

“Between those who think that civilization is a victory for man in the struggle against the determination of things—and particularly against that part of the universal determinism in which man is caught up the way the tip of a bird’s wing is stuck with bird-lime—and those who want to make of man a thing among things, there is no possible scheme of reconciliation.” — Georges Bernanos

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” — Wendell Berry

The lines of demarcation are becoming clearer. To this I would add Philip Rieff’s observation that what makes a civilization distinct — indeed, what makes a civilization at all — is what it forbids. “Freedom is the winning mantra” is a slogan of a hedonistic, materialist civilization that has no future. Rieff:

“That large numbers of the cultivated and intelligent have identified themselves deliberately with those who are supposed to have no love for instinctual renunciation, suggests to me the most elaborate act of suicide that Western intellectuals have ever staged – those intellectuals, whose historic function it has been to assert the authority of a culture organized in terms of communal purpose, through the agency of congregations of the faithful.”

A well-known Catholic philosopher wrote to me today with some eye-opening remarks about where we are as a culture, and how what is at stake now is nothing less than what it means to be a human being. That is, we are not primarily fighting for our faith; we are fighting for basic humanity. The philosopher wrote that he doesn’t think of it any more as the Benedict Option, but rather “the Benedict Necessity. We are mostly out of options, unless you consider apostasy an option.”

I am writing the book proposal this week. Things are moving very fast. People need to wake up. You can have St. Benedict, or you can have Dr. Berman. If you don’t choose, do not doubt for a second but that the choice will be made for you.

UPDATE: I see from the comments that some readers think this blog post is a remark about dildophobia. Honestly, some liberals who come here can be as dense and as unimaginative as any proof-texting Bible reader down at Bugtussle Baptist. This is a post about the sources of the self, and sacred order.

“I am more interested in why there is even a market for this. This is a market; therefore there is an unmet need. To be blunt, if spouses and significant others would put out more often and with more variety, no one would want or need this.”

Not everybody can get a spouse or a significant other and, as you mention, when they do there is no guarantee that if they do the spouse or significant other will want to “put out” as frequently as their partner desires sex.

I suspect the way the less sexually driven partner will react most of the time is not going to be by thinking their partner was driven to cheat with the robot because they neglected them sexually, but because their partner is a pathetic perve.

Why can’t we have monogamy and a varied sex life? Why can’t we be focused on our partner, but have the benefit of current sex research to be better in bed? Why not use telecommunications to stay sexually connected while physically apart?

It’s not like the Song of Solomon preaches an only “missionary with the lights off” model of sexuality.

Nobody is going to make anyone pick a side. The most that will happen is that some people (both on “your side” and on the “other side”) are going to pick options you look down upon.

Once again – so much fear. Hillary fear, followed by sex fear. Given that the SSM case starts Tuesday, I’m betting on gay fear next.

[NFR: Honestly, are you so obtuse as to think this comment was really about dildophobia? Sometimes, y’all are as literal-minded and as unimaginative as any proof-texting Bugtussle fundamentalist. — RD]

So you’re not dildophobic. Then what is your point? That because it exists it will become widely used and accepted? Seems like you don’t read much history. Humans turn every single technological advance into something to do with sex. Sex with your pet/farm animal is not really accepted and that has been going on since we domesticated animals. I doubt the existence of virtual sex and sex robots will bring down all civilization.

Re: The main problem with social conservatives it takes people until 25 – 30 to start family formation and they tend to avoid religion in this period. For a social conservative society to work you need to bring that age down.

I disagree. While the average age of first marriage is historically high, the 50s and 60s were also an aberration for being historically low. Moreover the kind of people who do settle down and raise families aren’t the problem at all. It’s the fact that a large swath of society never does find sufficient stability to settle down that we need to worry about.

“I see from the comments that some readers think this blog post is a remark about dildophobia. Honestly, some liberals who come here can be as dense and as unimaginative as any proof-texting Bible reader down at Bugtussle Baptist. This is a post about the sources of the self, and sacred order.”
Good line. But if people don’t have a sense of sacred order, they won’t recognize when other people are talking about it. Nothing could be more boring or less sexy than the future she’s talking about.

[NFR: Honestly, are you so obtuse as to think this comment was really about dildophobia? Sometimes, y’all are as literal-minded and as unimaginative as any proof-texting Bugtussle fundamentalist. — RD]

I thought I’d asked a fairly obvious question and make a similarly obvious comment. (Why can’t you pick some of both Benedict and Berman and still be within a sacred Christian order?)

Many of the recent posts appear to be fear based. (Language like “culture of death advances” and “we are fighting for basic humanity” certainly have more than a tinge of fear.)

Rod’s response to me (and others) basically boils down to “You’re stupid.” Fair enough, I’m fine with accepting the possibility for the sake of argument. The path from Berman’s post to a “culture of death” is certainly opaque to me.

Setting aside the relatively obvious issues (sex outside monogamous marriage, the issues Berman herself raises as downsides, etc.), I still don’t see how, say, using a vibrator in the context of a loving marriage is a violation of sacred order and a harbinger of the end of basic humanity.

As are most of the “benefits” resulting from the SexRev, this is another victory for the promiscuous, predatory male couched in terms of a win for the freedom of us all.

If current trends in porn are any indicator there is no lack of disturbed men who would love to use machines and other implements on passive women. And apparently some women, who ought to know better, do not see this as problematic. Like other moderns feminists can be so dense sometimes.

Sometimes when I read Rod, indeed many, what’s the word, rigorists? fanantics? fundamentalists?, i think of this quote from Hyam Maccoby.

“There is nothing more seductive to the human mind than dualism. It is romantic and exciting to see the world as the battleground of cosmic powers of Good and Evil. It is satisfying to one’s natural humility to disavow human capacity for good; and at the same time it is satisfying to one’s omnipotence-fantasy to see oneself as caught up in the sweep of the Divine Power-for-good. It is satisfying, too, to one’s feelings of aggression to identify some group of people with the World and the Powers of Evil; and it is usually some helpless group which is thus identified because to condemn a powerful group might lead to real engagement and commitment…
The terrible fear of hell which was such a feature of the Middle Ages, arises from the terror of the wrath of God. God is split into two aspects, the God of Love and the God of Wrath, and the object of religion [in this view] is to escape from one to the other…

(The idea that)Humanity takes its sanction from its origin in the Infinite, which gives it the right to self respect, to regard itself as the created idea of God. This feeling of the divine origin of the human, the sense that all human beings are children of God is lost in daulism.”

There is no question but that the son of Joh Fredersen would have been much happier in the long run with the Robot Maria than the real one.

Besides, he was too stupid to be able to tell the difference.

This is one of those times when our working boy has left himself so wide open that it really impossible not to laugh. Civilizations do not die, they change. Roman civilization never really fell. It mutated. Remember, when the Western half of the empire was overrun, the Eastern half was doing just fine. And by the time that fell, the Western Half was doing just fine. The idea that the coming of the Cyborgs is going bring the end of civilization is nonsensical on its face. It will merely be just another change, and the poor folks doing the Benedictine Option, assuming that they are allowed to, will find that the new civilization will have little use for what they believe they are preserving and will not be in any hurry to adopt it.

I’d argue that economic policies are far more destabilizing than sexual politics, but that’s because I think the vast majority of human beings are not seeking to engage in rampant sexual experimentation, and would rather love and be loved than be “a playa.”

I think more people are interested in being a player than you might think (which is not necessarily incompatible with love). You’re right on the main issue though, and the reason is this: economics determines culture, including sexual culture, much more than the other way around.

I just think that someone ought to write an avant-garde opera, in the style of John Cage or Philip Glass, titled Dildophobia. I think it would get rave reviews. Or a B-movie: Attack of the Dildophobes!

Gee, she envisions an impersonal, dystopian Schlaraffenland and wonders why people are getting more distant and addicted to sex.

And just by coincidence today I was reading an article about sex and love by Alice von Hildebrand (which I recommend), which is almost the exact opposite from this filthy. Really, on a well ordered perspective its not about demystifying or breaking taboos, but this is simply emptying the mystery of love.

There is definitely no communion between these two views, between St. Benedict and Dr. Berman.

It’s posts like this that really make me aware of how far apart we are.

I mean, I get the ascetic impulse, the withdrawal from material pleasures as a means of moving along one’s spiritual path. And I get the need for those who partake of material pleasures to do so thoughtfully and responsibly. I think I may even comprehend the concept of Original Sin, the idea that we were made for a life of Christian virtue and yet are all, inherently, from birth, deeply flawed in a way that makes that virtuous Christian life unreachable without divine intervention.

However, comprehension and acceptance are two different things. The Christian definition of human nature and human purpose kind of creeps me out.

It may turn out to be true. I’ll find out someday. But I have a hard time with the idea of surrendering to a God who would set us up like that. In this life, I’m going with love. I love my Goddess. I love this planet. And if there’s anything wrong with high-tech dildonics, it’s the same thing that’s wrong with our cars: the pollution and abuse involved in making and running them.

Charles–one DOES wonder what is in those five minutes where supposedly Joh Fredersen discovers what is going on, gets himself over to the “weird cottage”, breaks into Rotwang’s house, gets into a fight with Rotwang, and frees Maria. That’s a heck of a lot to pack into five minutes.

(And why is Joh Fredersen so blase about letting the workers into the Heart Machine room to let them destroy it? He explicitly tells Grot to open the doors….)

I love the movie but parts of it rival The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in its weirdness.